Return of the wicked

I had a great time with my parents and sister traveling through England and Scotland. :D
I'm still not completly over the photos I took from Madrid two months ago and I already have over a 1000 to work on... :s
But to my disapointment.... when I returned I had a "revelation"... damn it!
On the Canon 350d (like most Canon cameras and other decent SLR's), you can set some parameters to increase / decrease contrast, sharpness, saturation and color tone. I completely forgot that I left that setting in the highest contrast... :s
No wonder I had always the buildings black and the clouds white! I tweeked and played with all the settings and I completely forgot that one!... arghhh....... now I have a lot of work to fix them digitally, plus I probably won't get the detail to the levels I wanted :(
The compression towards the edges of the histogram shows me no mercy.... :S School-boy errors...

The only good thing about the photos is that my style is developing towards high contrast situations anyway, hard light and such, at least in portraits....
Once I have a concret, defined style of photography, I might be known for this. :p

Here are some samples. Madrid first:

And England / Scotland, untreated: